We do not want to undermine anyone ; nor do we undermine anyone. However,it is beyond our comprehension why a north Indian legendary sage Agastya should have taken the trouble of arriving, in times of yore, from Mount Kailasam(!!!!) crossing rivers, valleys and hills, in our land, that is Tamil Nadu, for the sake of teaching our own language to us. He could have done this service to any other people on his way. Why did he come this far , to the southern most corner of the Indian continent, is our question. The absurdity of the Agasthiyar story becomes plain in the light of the report on the genetic study made, by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology ( CCMB), Hyderabad, the state of Telangana, on the current Indian population. The study has conclusively proved that Kerala ( it was a part of ancient Tamil Nadu till the 14th century CE) and by extension, the present Tamil Nadu, were the first settlement of the fully-evolved modern humans from Africa, 60,000 years BCE. These people multiplied in number and spread ( may be thinly) all over the sub-continent in course of time, before being joined by another wave of humans who left Africa twenty thousand years later ( 40,000 BCE) to settle in the Eurasian part of the globe and a part of whom slowly moved from there towards the south-east to settle in today’s Afghanistan,and, finally, in the Indus Valley.
I need clarification, from the person who raised this query to me, on the following point. The power of speech is what distinguishes man from an animal. Were the first people who settled in Kerala and by extension , Tamil Nadu, speechless till the Vedic saint arrived to teach them a language? If you want us to admit that it was so, then, we would like to ask you why the sage did not teach us the Vedic language that was his but taught us another language that is now called Tamil and that is far-removed in all aspects from his own tongue? I do not know how long the Sanskritists will try to take us for a ride! It is a pity that legends and mythologies that defy logic still enjoy currency in the country that prides itself on keeping pace with all scientific achievements that are taking place elsewhere , particularly, the west.
As Prof R. MadhivaaNan ( a language archaeologist/etymologist ) rightly said, Agasthiyar, the Vedic sage , would have come and settled in Tamil Nadu ( on the Western Ghat portion of the state adjoining Kerala - Podhigai Hills is the Tamil name for it - the first Tv Tamil Channel run by the union government is named after this hill ) not for teaching Tamil to the natives and writing a grammar for the language , but, to learn Tamil literary works and grammar from the Tamil sages called AndhaNars. Here, it is pertinent to remember that the narrative on Agasthiyar is a 10th or 11th century CE creation of the Tamil commentators who had a Sanskrit-leaning ( Sanskrit, by this time, had gained a foothold in the Tamil land ). If references to the submerged Kumari Kandam in the Tamil commentaries of the mid-centuries of the last millennium cannot be taken at their face value, how, then, can one believe in the Agasthiyar - creator of Tamil , theory alone? Kumari Kandam, at least , has hopes of being discovered from the waters of the ocean, sooner or later ( the news that recent satellite images reveal a submerged mini-continent between Madagascar and south India is encouraging ), but the former has no such hopes.
By
K. Jagadeesh
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